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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25386607">delinquent fantasy</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/'>Anonymous</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The 1975 (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Nested Narrative, Trans Male Character, also exploring masculinity specifically transmasculinity as a theme and shit, matty is trans here cause i felt like it</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 11:54:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,113</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25386607</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Recollection of a muggy Parisian summer, 2010. Two broke strangers meet in a cafe and one is 1000% straight. Hilarity and generally feeling shitty ensues, or whatever</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>George Daniel/Matthew Healy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>anonymous</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>delinquent fantasy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>tw: suicidal thoughts, homophobic slurs</p><p>it's still funny tho i swear</p><p>these are characterizations and as such please don’t read this as speculative fiction, thanks</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> When I think of him, I think of his laugh. That’s the first thing I think of. The first thing that I remember. It clings in my ear canals, the residue of mirth and release and vitality, air wrest from darkened wet recesses of lungs, hear it thrum as it scrapes around the back of his throat and escapes through the slits between his teeth and stretched lips, vibrations cracking across pitches, acrid gulps and heat thrust out in humid exhalations and fucking hell goddamn I wanna die in this instant, I wanna die so I can only know this sound for the rest of time. And when his ghost comes unimprinted from the underside of my skull, I want his laugh to be the last thing to leave, spooling out over my earlobes. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I quite enjoy this vignette. It sounds good in isolation. But I can’t seem to ignore the tug of it, pulling me back down through old forgotten layers of years and dusty unturned months, and— </em>
</p><p> </p><p>2010 is Montmartre’s summer of hell. Well, at least for a Brit like me, Paris is positively burning. Agathe’s cafe, squeezed into a cramped, thoroughly local cobblestone alleyway off the bustling Rue Lepic, bursts wall-to-wall with a sea of soaked jackets propped up by agitated arms, wet hair limp on disgruntled scalps. Heat seethes from bodies and 25 degrees, as it turns out, is absolutely sweltering in an uncomfortably minuscule room full of limbs and mewling children. The impromptu storm has done fuck all to alleviate the feverish temperature. </p><p> </p><p>God, I fucking hate tourists.</p><p> </p><p>Sadly, the slap of rain against pavement does not abate, and I slump further into my chair, the curved wood digging into a few unfortunate vertebra. Few squatters remain at the singular pair of vertical windows flanking the central wooden door, whose steadily chipping layer of once-periwinkle-blue paint is nigh on gray. In fact, the oppressive verticality (that’s not a real word but I'm hereby coining it) of the cafe walls has shunted the throng across now-grimy parquet, dispersed dangerously close to available seating. Resultant newly-minted patrons begin to annex the dwindling number of remaining tables, encroaching upon my corner haunt. I retreat back into my paperback copy of <em> Norwegian Wood </em>.</p><p> </p><p>“Excusez-moi, ça vous dérange si je m'assois ici?”</p><p> </p><p>The genteel upward inflection of a polite question mark tumbles from the stranger’s tongue before his preceding vowels even get a chance to hit my ears, so je suis désolé mais j’ai encore du mal avec le français, répète ça s'il vous plaît? It’s what I always say, before all the projected familiar ease and Parisian colloquialism sloughs off, leaving sheepish sorry, wots and harried responses in English on the part of the poor Frenchie whose time I’m wasting.</p><p> </p><p>The Frenchie in question (probably around my age, I would reckon) has shifted his weight onto the hand whose fingertips only moments before had been hovering politely above the table grain, palm entrenched and connected shoulder risen close by his neck.</p><p> </p><p>“Mind if I sit here, mate?”</p><p> </p><p>Definite Englander. How the fuck is his French better than mine?</p><p> </p><p>“Go ahead.”</p><p>“Cheers.”</p><p> </p><p>I pray to god that there was no hesitation between my reply and his original query. Because if he did detect a pause— the slightest hesitation, tepid and pregnant in the air between us— everything would be fucked. Because then he would also know my shock at the propinquity of a fellow Brit. And the vestigial intrigue. And the uncertainty, the subsequent calculated nature of my response. I would have betrayed that he had thrown me off, left me stilted and reeling, while he was completely fine and natural and secure in his perfect fucking French bloody hell goddamn.</p><p> </p><p>God, I need to stop being such a girl.</p><p> </p><p>It’s child’s play to radiate indifference whilst reading a book. All you have to do is observe letters and punctuation, and the actual semantics will, theoretically, flounder in your mind before ultimately finding you later. Assured, I settle my eyes on the last paragraph of my abandoned 62nd page.</p><p> </p><p>Two minutes in and I’m not progressing a word past this bloody sentence. Curiosity is an absolute bastard. I risk a glance upwards just over the novel’s top margin and relief floods through my capillaries to find no pupils uneasily engaging me. It’s safe to linger. He’s looking around the cafe, taking it in. His eyes are locked on— if I remember the placement correctly— the Keith Haring print on the opposite wall of the shop, hovering just above the counter. Agathe does love her American artists. </p><p> </p><p>There’s something non-transactional about the way he’s gazing, like the antithesis of most people seeking when they look. Instead, he’s receiving what he’s being presented with, like film being exposed to light, preserving the images that have percolated onto it. </p><p> </p><p>I sense his stare gravitating back towards the table. I drop my eyes back to the page. </p><p> </p><p>I am made instantly aware that my cautiousness has been squandered when I feel his eyes boring into me. He’s found me out. Thrill surges to my extremities and my fingertips and lips are tingling and there’s an itchy feeling that’s making my guts expand and what the fuck is going on? I keep my head down to see if he’ll let up. Every heartbeat my body expands and I’m floating for an infinitesimal fraction of a second before my atria contracts and along with it the feeling of weightlessness. This is bullshit.</p><p> </p><p>I lock eyes with him. </p><p> </p><p>He pales for an instant but doesn’t break and there’s an openness there that is arresting even though I’m the one who parried but I stay with him, if only for the sole intent of fucking with him. And then his eyes flit away and his lips part, drawing into a smile revealing a gap between his canine and incisor and holy fuck he fucking sniggers. I tamp down the spark of victory and to my utter disappointment a girlish giggle escapes me.</p><p> </p><p>“Alright?” he says, clearly amused.</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>He points, “Murakami?”</p><p> </p><p>This bloke is fucking absurd. Who leads with Murakami?</p><p> </p><p>“Yeah,” I mutter vaguely before clearing my throat and speaking up, “You fuck with him?”</p><p>“Yeah, but not with <em> Norwegian Wood </em>.”</p><p>“Wh— how do you mean?”</p><p>“It’s fucking depressing, innit?”</p><p>“Yeah. I don’t see how that detracts fr—”</p><p>“You don’t read Murakami for depressing, you read for the surrealism and the weirdness.”</p><p>“Don’t— you can’t ghet— just ghettoize him into the role of a surrealist writer and then assess his work on the preconceived criteria you’ve conjured up and then be angry that it’s not what you expected because that’s your fucking problem as a reader mate, not his as an author’s. That’s just not how literature works.”</p><p>“Alright, chill out, I barely read anyways.”</p><p> </p><p>I take a deep inhale. Jesus christ, take a fucking break mate, no one cares about your inane literature rants.</p><p> </p><p>“You like Keith Haring?” I tilt my head back towards the print.</p><p>“Who doesn’t?” he chuckles.</p><p> </p><p>He doesn’t hold a grudge, thank god.</p><p> </p><p>“Though out of his contemporaries I like Basquiat more. Or— ‘more’ is a massive understatement, I guess, I mean, not ‘like’ either, er—” he sighs and tries again, “Basquiat’s my favorite artist.”</p><p> </p><p>Who the fuck is Basquiat?</p><p> </p><p>I reply, “Yeah, I like his work.”</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p> </p><p>Now is an incredibly apt time to change the subject.</p><p> </p><p>“Mate, how the fuck is your French so good?”</p><p> </p><p>He sniffs wearily, caught off guard by the sudden turn of conversation, but seemingly not by the question, like he gets it all too often. </p><p> </p><p>“Erm— Mum’s French. Dad’s British.”</p><p>“I totally pegged you for a Frenchie.”</p><p>“I bet you did, with your ‘je suis désolé, mais j’ai encore—’”</p><p>“Oh shut the fuck up.” </p><p> </p><p>He grins. I think I’m gonna die. Can’t I just be my pretentious, prick self sans-consequence?</p><p> </p><p>“I’m George,” he says, sticking out his hand. </p><p> </p><p>This I can’t fuck up.</p><p> </p><p>I shake it. “Matt.”</p><p>“Matty! New friend, ahnnn?” </p><p> </p><p>Goddammit.</p><p> </p><p>Agathe squeezes her knuckly fingers around the flesh between my shoulder and my neck in what I assume she thinks is an auntlike way. Twat. She used ‘Matty’.</p><p> </p><p>One of George’s eyebrows twitches but he says nothing.</p><p> </p><p>“Way too many customers and too few tables, huh?” I say, the retort grating awkwardly against the silent interim following her initial comment.</p><p>“And yet, still not enough money.”</p><p>“Well, maybe if you capitalized on the momen—”</p><p>“Vous désirez?” she interjects, turning to George. </p><p>He’s smirking but quickly sobers. “Un pain au chocolat, s'il vous plaît.”</p><p>“Et ensuite de ça?”</p><p>“You’re getting greedy!” I protest.</p><p>“It’s pure French politeness, you know nothing.”</p><p>“C’est tout, merci.”</p><p>“Pas de problème.”</p><p>You? she says rather aggressively and just a cafe au lait, thanks.</p><p>She plants her palm on the top of my head. “Ravi de vous rencontrer, mmm...”</p><p> </p><p>I slide out from underneath the pressure of her hand but grab her wrist as she retracts it. Her arm goes limp in my grip.</p><p> </p><p>“George,” he finishes, English accent exercised.</p><p>If she’s surprised, she smothers it with a, “Well, George, enchanté.” </p><p> </p><p>She rounds on her heel to attend to the neglected customers, shucking off my hand. As she pivots, I spy a cigarette resting on the back of her ear, nestled amongst dark flyaways.</p><p> </p><p>I whinge, leaning back in my chair, “Agathe, attendre.”</p><p> </p><p>He’s looking at me.</p><p> </p><p>I want your attention. I want to entertain you. I want you to be my voyeur. I want you to watch me at ease, to observe how I prowl, I want you to see me push her, see how I know exactly how close I can get to the surf pulled back exposing beach sand before the wave crashes back down and I flee. My intimate understanding of that sea, of her, of how she works, how I elude drowning. I want you to know me.</p><p> </p><p>Agathe glances back at me, agitated. I fish around in my shorts pocket, then procure a 10c coin with ceremony. I point to the fag. </p><p> </p><p>“Quoi? I am your drug dealer now?”</p><p> </p><p>She scrabbles at her scalp above her ear, extricating it and pushing it into my palm hastily. I thrust the coin towards her again, indignant.</p><p> </p><p>“Keep that,” she snaps.</p><p> </p><p>I let her leave. I still feel guilty about those first four months squatting rent-free in her bare studio space.</p><p> </p><p>Later. It’s not raining anymore, the sky instead adopting an upset gray tinged with the violet of more to come. Everyone’s left. We’re outside and George keeps tugging and rolling a shoulder length curl between his index finger and his thumb, dark irises trained on me. I wish he would stop fucking doing that. His behavior is approaching salacious levels and god I would give anything to be a bona fide faggot. A bona fide faggot, not because I fancy blokes, but because then I wouldn’t be a lesbian who couldn’t cope with the oppressive machinations of the patriarchy and now is deluding herself by playing dress up, all to cling to some scintilla of heteronormality. A bona fide faggot because then I would’ve come out the womb with a dick, never would’ve developed chest tumors that I had to excise for thousands of my own quid, would’ve still been living with my mother. Cos if your kid’s a faggot, and you don’t want to see faggots, you turn a blind eye. Transgenders, however... transgenders ask you to murder your own child in cold blood, the one you’ve been raising for years, decades, even, who you’ve affixed your life to, who you’ve screamed and cried and immolated dreams for. They demand you make peace with, no, advocate for the new imposter who has supplanted them. They ask to go to the NHS, and if they’re impatient little cunts, they’ll ask for money for the private clinics. They ask for your time. They ask you to change.</p><p> </p><p>The grainy sound of paper and tobacco disintegrating permeates the little expanse beneath the awning as I pull through the resistance, viscous bitterness saturating my mouth and my tongue. I hold death inside me. And I exhale through my nose.</p><p> </p><p>“How is it?”</p><p>“It’s fine. It’s a fag. What d’you expect.”</p><p>He peers at me. “Alright?”</p><p>“Fine.”</p><p> </p><p>He snorts incredulously.</p><p> </p><p>“What.”</p><p> </p><p>His eyes dart towards me and away again.</p><p> </p><p>“What,” I repeat.</p><p>He shakes his head. “Mind if I have a drag?”</p><p>“Mind if you— you do realize this is the only one I have on me, right? And I’m smoking it currently?” I splutter.</p><p>“You’re smoking it?”</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p> </p><p>He looks off towards where the alley forks.</p><p> </p><p>“Besides,” I continue, “it has my saliva all over it.”</p><p>“I don’t mind.”</p><p>“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”</p><p>“What the fuck’s wrong with me? You stood here for a full minute in complete silence, all brooding like. You didn’t even take more than one drag. You didn’t even tap off your ash.”</p><p> </p><p>I glance down. An atrophied cylinder at least two centimeters long protrudes from the paper. He’s right. </p><p> </p><p>I huff, offering it filter first.</p><p> </p><p>He sucks for an instant, pursing his lips and dropping his hand. Removes it with a thumb and a couple fingers. Inhaling more fully, looking up. Head leaned back against the glass as he blows a thin stream out. I wish I looked that bloody suave when I smoked.</p><p> </p><p>A smile dances across his lips. “You haven’t a fucking clue who Basquiat is, have you?"</p><p>“I haven’t.”</p><p> </p><p>A comfortable homeostasis settles in the space between us.</p><p> </p><p>“It’s Matty, also, if we’re doing it properly.”</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> It’s too hot underneath the sheets. My limbs feel long-desiccated, unsuccessfully resuffused with sweat they won’t take up, bound by layers of cloth and torridity. This is my funeral pyre. May as well collect my ashes later or let the wind sift me into the valleys of the fabric wrinkled from sleep and sobriety and vacancy. A car whirs by on the street. A white rectangle roves across the ceiling. I don’t want my back to touch with his. I know he would be bothered by the heat. I know he would be bothered by me. I extend my knee slothlike. I don’t want the mattress to shift and wake him. I don’t want to have to argue more. I wedge my foot out from underneath the blanket.  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> Coolness swathes my ankle and my sole and rivulets between my toes. I peel the sheet from where it’s adhered to my ribs and my thighs and my calves and I resurrect myself, muscles straining, corpselike. My legs dangle off the bed and my spine droops and everything feels like shit and I don’t know the difference between the thick blood sluggish through my veins and the air saturated with unresolve, pent up want, bottled cruelty.  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I lower my feet and pad to the window, fever siphoned into the wooden slats. The curtain undulates and night snakes around the back of my ear and unsuspends the salt trembling there, trailing down the side of my neck.  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I squeeze through the gap and emerge onto the slant of shingles, moon shining heavy through withering leaves. The fragrance of decay coats my nostrils. I wanna fucking cry so bad but there’s only a pressure behind my retinas, everything is shit and I am shit. Slate imprints into the heels of my hands as I shift my weight onto my tailbone. I wish my mum were here, but the one that would rub her thumb over my knuckles or hum Scarborough Fair chestily or sit with me in the quiet of the kitchen at 3 in the morning.  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I wish I were completely alone and okay with it. I feel so fucking lonely. Or maybe he makes me feel lonely. I know I make him feel lonely but I don’t know how to fix that. I know I disappoint him and I don’t know how to fix that. I know I elicit nothing, make him feel nothing, and I don’t know how to fucking fix it. I wish we could talk but it feels easier to hold my breath. Maybe easier’s not quite right. Maybe it’s habit, maybe it feels like what I ought to do. I can’t differentiate. I don’t want to be the couple who has a row in a restaurant, spitting vulgarities for an audience. I don’t want to be the couple who sits in silence, everything scabbed over, pleasantries and frost. I don’t want to have to wake up early and go to work. I want somebody to tell me it’s okay and coddle me and leave me alone and know what I want without asking and I wanna be happy or at the bare minimum content. I am miserable and I know it and that’s the most pathetic thing in the universe, a pity party attended and hosted utterly by myself.  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I breathe and feel dry air drawn down my throat. My chest fills shallowly and I push everything out, recycled molecules deposited back to their origin. Impermanence is shitty and useless and makes me wanna die. But what doesn’t? Everything is just a patchwork of little tributaries that lead back to death anyway. I’m sure if George heard he would say that that’s reductive, that it’s nihilistic. I don’t know why everyone claims nihilism as depressing. It’s truth but it’s empty truth, too gaping wide for human sanity, truth you can either reckon with or push away and think about some other day. I want my life to happen some other day. I am tired. Maybe I could doze off on the rooftop and then gravity could take me and return me to the dirt. That would be nice. I don’t want to have to think over my life before I die. Sounds depressing. But I don’t want to be melodramatic either. Jumping off a roof is too Plathian, too Stepford wifey. Especially if I’m found in my boxers and nothing else. I should hang myself in the closet like an English gentleman. Or just be polite and somewhat spineless and go back to bed. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I retire back into the morgue-like still of the room. I kneel next to George, his elbow outstretched, fingers prone and curved. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> George, I know you don’t love me anymore and I don’t love you anymore but sometimes I wish we were still in love. I’m going to sleep on the sofa now. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> I feel like I should want to kiss him, want to touch my skin against his skin. But his presence repels me, and it’s not that I hate him, it’s that I’m exhausted and used to the feeling. </em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>im sorry if this reads like a soap opera, i’m trying to write this screenplay and it’s frustrating as fuck so i did this instead. i’m not used to writing prose. it’s my first time writing fanfic lmao. it doesn't flow right when it needs to. i'm from the us so hopefully i got the britishisms right but i didn't change my spelling or anything. maybe ill try to write the rest of the chapters how i envision the plot unfolding but i also might just stop here because that took way longer than i was anticipating. sorry.</p><p>i’m,,,,, so fuckinggay</p><p>pls leave comments i am lonely and want to talk to strangers on the internet</p></blockquote></div></div>
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